


The Grapes Of Mild Irritation

by Mussimm



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: M/M, animal rights, or at least enjoy his cup of tea in peace, snuddling, you should let your animal do his taxes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-18
Updated: 2020-11-18
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:22:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27622006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mussimm/pseuds/Mussimm
Summary: Crowley finds there are some boundary issues when he's in snake form.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 28
Kudos: 165
Collections: Get A Wiggle On Zine





	The Grapes Of Mild Irritation

**Author's Note:**

> My contribution to the Get a Wiggle On zine.

The thing about animals is that people don’t treat them like people. 

Of course they don’t. That’d just be silly, asking your cat to do his taxes or calling the police on a suspicious looking rat. There’s no call to treat animals like people, they’re much happier being treated like animals. Which is good, because that’s what people do. The thing about it, Crowley had recently discovered, was that people treat animals like animals even when they know they’re really people. And that was a problem. 

He’d never spent much time as a snake, and he’d definitely not spent much time in the bookshop as a snake, but after the world didn’t end there were a lot of changes. Sometimes a demon just liked to remember he was a demon rather than a well-to-do boomer going through a goth phase. 

So, snake. And much to his surprise, getting treated like a snake. And even more to his surprise, being too flabbergasted to do anything about it. 

The first time was innocent enough, innocuous, he’d say. Just a regular Thursday evening at the bookshop, drinking a cup of tea and taking up space while the angel did his inventory. 

Then suddenly  _ not _ drinking a cup of tea, because Aziraphale picked it up just as Crowley was leaning in for another sip and walked away. Crowley watched him, surprised into silence, as Aziraphale took the cup of tea to the kitchen and didn’t bring it back. 

“Angel,” he said, as Aziraphale pottered about, reorganising books and straightening papers, “That was my tea.”

“I’m tidying up, dear,” the angel said, as if that explained anything at all. 

“I was drinking that.”

“Hmm?”

Crowley slipped back into his human form, if only because he needed an eyebrow to raise. Aziraphale could be rude. Actually, he specialised in being rude, but usually to customers. Crowley stared after him, trying to puzzle this one out.

No reaction. He just kept tidying, head in the clouds. How had he spent six thousand years in love with this scatterbrain? 

“Angel,” he said. 

“Hmm? Oh!” Aziraphale straightened, his cleaning forgotten. “Oh, dear, there you are. Tired of being a snake, then? Let me just get you a cup of tea.”

Crowley was too confused to even sputter about it. 

He let it go. Sometimes a demon had to be a snake and sometimes an angel had to be eccentric.

He didn’t give it much thought until a few days later. He was enjoying a nap in the sun on the windowsill. Aziraphale liked having him there to scare off customers. Crowley liked being there to digest his food. A good arrangement all around. 

He was sunning his belly, half asleep, tongue halfway out his mouth in sheer sleepy comfort, when he was all of a sudden hoisted into the air with an embarrassing  _ hrrrk! _ Two big, strong hands were quite literally all over him, something he might have enjoyed if the big, strong hands had  _ asked first. _

“Wha-?!” he managed, head spinning. “Wassat?”

Then he was back on the ground, or at least on a big fluffy cushion, Aziraphale’s hands retreating.

“Oh, I’m sorry, dear, I didn’t mean to wake you. Only that’s such a hard spot, I thought you’d be more comfortable here.”

“‘Zzzziraphale y’can’t just go round picking people up!” Crowley slurred, still half-asleep. The cushion was pretty comfy, he’d give him that. But still. 

“There’s no need to get snippy.”

“I think you’ll find there is.”

“Go back to sleep, you grumpy old snake.”

And what was he supposed to say to that? ‘I’ve been fantasising about your hands on me since the late Roman period, make it worth my while next time’? 

Because he had. Been doing the fantasising, that is. Lots of idle thoughts about hand touching and hand holding and even imagining Aziraphale’s fingers tracing the delicate bones of his wrist, if he was feeling racy. A bunch of very nice fantasies which were not at all fulfilled by getting picked up like a coil of rope and manhandled across the room. 

So, he was a snake. He came to terms with it on his fluffy cushion in the sun. He had the rights and the dignity of a snake, no matter how much Aziraphale definitely knew he was not usually a snake. 

Aziraphale looked at him and saw a snake.

Fine. 

He should have put a stop to things right then. Done the angelic thing, sat Aziraphale down and had a discussion about boundaries. Because he was so well known for sitting people down for mature discussions about personal issues. That was his signature move. Ol’ Anthony ‘J’Emotionally Available’ Crowley. 

He didn’t. 

Things went on that way. Aziraphale being Aziraphale, Crowley being Crowley, occasionally having his personal boundaries piffed out the window without so much as a moment’s notice. 

He was getting used to it, really, he was. He couldn’t have anticipated what would happen next. That part wasn’t his fault. 

It was just Aziraphale, being all soft and lovely at midnight on a weekend. He’d been reading, drinking, all…  _ him _ in the low lights, flushed pink with wine and comfy and round. Like a fluffy cushion propped in the corner of his favourite armchair. It would be terribly good (and not Good) to slither over there and curl up on that cushion. It’d be warm like a sunny windowsill. 

Crowley was half-asleep with the idea flitting across his brain, the softness and the warmth, ancient velveteen under his scales. The steady in-and-out of Aziraphale’s breathing, the faint thrum of his heartbeat. Nothing wrong with that at all. A nice, moderate fantasy that didn’t make him feel like a greasy perv. Perfect napping conditions.

Right up until Aziraphale swayed forward in his chair, tipsy, and shucked his jacket. Alarm bells blared in Crowley’s head. He couldn’t remember this ever happening, no matter how sloshed they got. 

Aziraphale folded the jacket neatly and draped it over the arm of his chair, then unbuttoned one cuff. 

Crowley’s mouth hung open as he watched the angel roll up his sleeve in short, methodical movements, his skin bared to the air inch by painstaking inch. His forearm was lily pale and covered in a dusting of white hair, his fingers skimming along as he folded the fabric up. A tendon in his arm stretched and arched as he moved, something foreign and tantalising to Crowley’s half-asleep eyes. 

Somehow it came as a surprise when he popped the other cufflink, repeated the same procedure. Two stark naked angel forearms in the lamplight, golden and glowing and just… just…  _ biteable. _ His dippy, silly angel just showing off his bare skin for all and sundry to see in the low light of the evening bookshop. 

Crowley was staring, agog, eyes running along the line of that wrist, the delicate skin revealed, the soft white peach fluff, the luminescent glow of him. 

Aziraphale reached up and tugged at his bowtie. 

“ _ Angel! _ ” Crowley didn’t like the hysterical rise in his voice, the scandalised tone of a matron from 1800. 

“What?” Aziraphale asked, still undoing that bow with nimble fingers like Crowley wasn’t  _ right there. _

“I’m still here!” He hadn’t realised he could squeal at that pitch. Definitely hysterical matron. Embarrassingly so. 

“Why are you being such a-” 

Crowley didn’t hear the rest, he had his head buried in the cushions of the sofa so deeply he couldn’t hear a thing. Couldn’t see a thing. Couldn’t see bare wrists or any hint of collarbone. Couldn’t see the angel undressing himself right there like a floozy. 

_ Right there. _

Like a  _ floozy. _

This whole snake thing wasn’t working out. He’d started doing this to feel more like a demon, but it ended up with him acting like a pearl-clutching virgin aunt. The more this happened the more he heard yodelling objections about what was right and proper shrieking their way out of his throat, and he didn’t care for the role reversal. 

This had to stop. Crowley knew it had to stop and only knew it better as Aziraphale’s striptease replayed itself behind his eyelids for three days afterwards. They had to set up some snake related rules. Write them on a chalkboard, put up a little jar the angel had to drop a coin into whenever he did something scandalous. 

But Aziraphale wouldn’t  _ listen. _ Six thousand years of being able to turn the angel into a flustered, dithering mess with the mere suggestion he was doing something inappropriate and all of a sudden he was unflappable. 

Fine.  _ Fine. _

He might have been acting like an increasingly hysterical schoolmarm but he wasn’t one. He was a demon. He didn’t need to gently nudge Aziraphale towards acting respectably, he had other moves in his playbook. 

And turnabout was fair play.

So he waited for the right moment. It took a while, a few days of napping in the sun, one eye half open, and nights curled on the sofa, guarding his wineglass jealously in case it was suddenly snatched away. He spent a bit of time looking human, noting how Aziraphale’s bowtie stayed where it belonged and the angel didn’t so much as let their hands brush, went all aflutter if Crowley sat too close to him. 

It was an afternoon when Crowley got him just where he wanted him. Specifically, lounged back on his sofa, warm woolly vest in place, lost in a book so deep he’d forgotten he had company. 

Time to put Operation: Embarrass The Angel Into Behaving Himself into action. 

He slithered down from his perch silently, wound up the leg of the sofa stealthily, took the vast expanse of the cushions inch by inch so Aziraphale didn’t feel him sliding up the outside of his leg. It was payback time. 

With as much dramatic flair as he could muster without arms, legs or facial expressions, Crowley slid up over Aziraphale’s belly and twisted himself into a loose coil right in the middle of the angel’s chest. Every inch of him, flesh touching flesh, sharing body heat, vibrating with the angel’s breathing, his heartbeat, the quiet, deep rhythms of his body. 

Up close he could smell Aziraphale’s skin, see each happy crease around his eyes, catch the pink dart of his tongue as he wet his lips. 

Crowley had made a terrible mistake.

“Hmm?” Aziraphale barely looked up from his book. “Oh, yes, it is a bit chilly, isn’t it?”

He sat frozen on Aziraphale’s belly, gently rising and falling with each breath. He stayed there, a weird fear suddenly developing that if he moved Aziraphale might realise that Crowley was bodily draped across him and put a stop to it. 

Aziraphale raised a hand to his mouth, sucked the tip of his finger into his mouth to wet it before turning another page, and gave a content little sigh that sent a gust of warm air over Crowley’s scales. Raised his eyebrows at something he read in that way that made his eyes rounder and bluer and his whole face more infuriatingly adorable.

Crowley had made a  _ terrible mistake. _

The angel was doing this on purpose. He had to be. He couldn’t be as relaxed as a puddle of chocolate pudding while Crowley sat on top of him, his whole body electrified. 

“Aziraphale,” he said, his voice coming out rough and hoarse and just plain weird. 

The angel didn’t look up from his book. “Mm?”

“I’m still me, you know. When I’m like this.”

“I know that.”

“I don’t think you do.”

Aziraphale finally let his book drop, hanging limp in one hand to look at Crowley. “What are you on about, dear?”

He asked that, their faces so close that with a little dart forward Crowley could be giving him little snake kisses right on his stupid angel nose. 

Crowley couldn’t take it anymore. 

With a hiss of frustration he slipped back into his human skin, still lying on top of the angel. Their bodies twined together, Crowley coming to rest between Aziraphale’s thighs, his arms crossed over the angel’s chest, chin in one hand, waiting patiently for his scatterbrained beloved to figure it out. 

Aziraphale stared at him, no longer relaxed, his eyes wide and his mouth hanging open. Shade by shade he turned the most delightful beet red, frozen as still as Crowley had been a few minutes ago. 

After a long, painful pause he finally breathed out, “Oh.”

“Yes, ‘oh’,” Crowley agreed.

“I… I suppose I have been a bit… casual…” 

“Just a bit.”

The angel’s tongue darted out to wet his lips, his bright red face turning a little sad, his eyes fixed somewhere over Crowley’s shoulder, refusing to look at him.

Oh, now, this wasn’t fun. Making the angel blush was fun, not actually upsetting him. 

Crowley shifted, bracing an arm on the sofa and pulling himself back, preparing to get up. 

Aziraphale’s hand shot out lightning fast, fisting in Crowley’s jacket, keeping him in place. Crowley glanced at the hand then back to Aziraphale. He raised an eyebrow.

“Uh,” Aziraphale somehow managed to turn even redder. “I, uh, I think I rather like it this way, as well.”

It took Crowley’s brain a few seconds to work through that one, turning it over in his head, checking every angle to make sure that yes, in fact, Aziraphale was asking him for a cuddle. He blinked, dopey with it, sure he’d somehow heard wrong. But no, that was definitely the usual angel, lying underneath him, cheeks all pink and eyes all blue and nervous as a fainting goat, asking him to stay. 

It took him even another moment to convince his arms to work, to relax, to lower himself back down. And both of them needed a bit of shuffling and nervous smiling and rearranging to settle back down. 

Then he was actually, properly draped across his angel, lying on his fuzzy vest, listening to his heartbeat and rising and falling with his breathing. And this, this was quite a lot better than his spot in the sun. 

As they relaxed into each other and Crowley’s late afternoon sleepiness started to creep back, as Aziraphale found his hold on his book and started reading again, Crowley thought this plan might have worked out a fair bit better than he’d imagined. 

Actually, now he thought about it, there was something to be said for being a snake. 


End file.
